Letters to the editor

Joshua Green (“The Amazing Money Machine,” June Atlantic) is probably too young to remember the revolutionary direct-mail campaign that fueled George McGovern’s ’72 presidential campaign. It was the brainchild of Morris Dees, who, along with a couple of brilliant direct-marketing guys from New York, put together “The Presidential Club”—a monthly giving campaign for small donors for McGovern. It was a huge success and embodied all the principles Green is now attributing to Mark Gorenberg. The only thing it lacked was the Internet and the kind of instant digital technology that is available now.

Because McGovern suffered such an ignominious defeat, people tend to forget that there were aspects of his campaign—energizing the younger generation, speaking out early and often against a very ill-advised war effort, and small-donor fund-raising in particular—to which Gorenberg and Obama owe a great deal in terms of precedent.

Senator McGovern is 84 now and deserves much more recognition for his contributions to the Democrats. Young pups like Green really ought to spend a little more time doing their homework before making sweeping statements like “The only way to raise money was to attract small donors, a task Democrats had never done well.”

Larry Bangs Boulder, Colo.

Joshua Green replies:

Larry Bangs might benefit from doing a little homework, too. George McGovern was outspent 2-to-1 by Richard Nixon in 1972. My article explained why that won’t happen to Barack Obama. He has reached a broader, more diverse group of small-dollar donors than McGovern ever did—and one that I’ll bet even includes its share of curmudgeons.

Near-Earth Objects

Gregg Easterbrook paints a vivid picture of impending cataclysmic impacts and urges a massive repositioning of government funding toward asteroid defense (“The Sky Is Falling,” June Atlantic). Easterbrook is a distinguished science journalist, but he has spun a sensational Chicken Little story. His article suggests that the probability of a “devastating” Earth impact this century is as high as one in 10. Multiple research studies based on craters, atmospheric strikes, and counts of near-Earth objects suggest probabilities hundreds to thousands of times lower.

The difference between catastrophic Earth impacts every 300,000 years and every 1,000 years is the difference between an infinitesimal threat and looming Armageddon. Guided mostly by solid science, NASA and other national and international agencies have prioritized their programs rationally—monitoring near-Earth objects but not massively shifting resources to some Star Wars–style defense system aimed upward.

Historical and geological records stretching back thousands of years indicate that floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis kill thousands of humans worldwide on a regular basis. In contrast, there’s no evidence that any human anywhere has ever been killed by an extraterrestrial impact. Societies do little enough to mitigate the real and pressing threats from earthly natural hazards without shifting resources to imagined dangers from the wild fringes of the solar system and the wild fringes of science.

Estimates of the frequency of space-rock strikes are just estimates, and may not tell us anything about when the next impact will occur—it could be an eon, it could be tomorrow. Floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis are sure to happen more frequently, but humanity will survive these events; we might not survive an impact from space. Meanwhile, nothing can be done to prevent earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis. But space strikes appear to be entirely avoidable, and not necessarily with “massive repositioning of government funding.” A fraction of the money NASA wants to waste on a moon base would likely be sufficient.

The Old College Try

I will acknowledge that secondary schools have been allowing numerous underprepared students to pass on to the next level of education, and I agree that the buck has to stop with someone and that that someone must often be me—the lower-division adjunct English instructor at a university with few acceptance requirements—but I vehemently disagree with Professor X (“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” June Atlantic) that the solution is to fail these students in their required English courses.

The author seems to think he’s there to test his students on whether they already know how to complete a writing task, rather than to teach them how to complete it. The real travesty is that universities are willing to hire people who aren’t interested in their students’ success. Many of my students pass my courses because of a tremendous amount of work on both our parts, and while it can be exhausting at times, it’s work that I ultimately find deeply satisfying. Perhaps it’s time for Professor X to look for employment elsewhere than in our higher-education system, where he has clearly “los[t] faith in the task.”

Professor X reveals a trend in American society that is reducing yet another meaningful experience—in this case, getting a college education—to its lowest common denominator: obtaining a college degree.

Adult education has become the cash cow for many small regional colleges and universities, and for many freestanding “universities.” One cannot drive through any large city in the country without seeing names with University attached, offering degrees in any subject. One can now get (I do not write earn) a Ph.D. online. For many Americans and their employers, it makes little difference where one gets the degree. Satellite centers are established in shopping centers; part-time faculty is hired on a course-by-course basis; an open-admissions policy allows anyone who can pay the fee to enroll in classes.

May the Goddess of Wisdom continue to bless Professor X, who is swimming against the current that is sweeping America toward becoming the country with the highest level of college degrees and the lowest level of college education.

James C. Coomer Emeritus professor of political science Norcross, Ga.

Professor X’s rebuke of American colleges for their practice of admitting students “to classes they cannot possibly pass” is basically unchallengeable. Anyone who’s been involved in adjunct teaching at the community-college level over the past 10 or 15 years, in particular English Composition I and II, will nod in instant recognition at almost every point he makes and every personal anecdote he uses. Yet his critique falls far short of identifying the root cause of the problem: the systematic underfunding of public higher education.

Take the City University of New York (CUNY). Once a beacon on the hill, in the late 1970s it fell victim to the type of savage budget-axing and personnel downsizing that corporate America would in the 1990s impose across broad sectors of the American labor force. As a consequence, close to 70 percent of all CUNY teachers are, like Professor X, part-time.

Massive underfunding inevitably produces a situation in which college administrators begin acting like subprime-mortgage lenders, preying on the working poor by promising, as the Borough of Manhattan Community College did in its recent advertising blitzkrieg across the city, “When you start here, you can go anywhere!” In 2006, I quit a tenured teaching position at BMCC largely because, between 2000 and 2006, the college added more than 3,000 new students, instantly producing all the same depressing classroom stories chronicled by Professor X.

Professor X will have us believe this whole situation is an indictment of the American ideal of an affordable and accessible higher education for everyone. It is a tempting conclusion to draw for anyone working in the trenches of the American community-college system. In the end, though, Professor X offers nothing more than a classic case of lashing out in the direction of least resistance—of blaming the victims instead of the U.S. corporate oligarchy.